Monday, December 31, 2007

End-of-year update

The bridge is coming along nicely. These pictures are from Saturday, December 29, 2007.

Here Bettie surveys the one poured footer


And here it is from a distance. I'm standing in the creek, on a rock.


One of the reasons it looked good is that they're drinking Sprite instead of something harder


There's more work on the septic system, as well. Mostly those are pictures of holes in dirt, but here's my leap for life


It was starting to get darker, so the pix are a bit grainy, but they're still good. Here's Bettie and I standing in our dining room, with the driveway hidden behind our shoulders.


And a couple more to round out the sampling. Different views of the footing.




The first looks downstream, the second upstream.

Monday, December 24, 2007

Big equipment does big work

We stopped out at the property on Sunday afternoon 12/23/2007. They are making good progress on building the bridge, and the driveway, and the septic system.

Here's the overview of the bridge. We're looking down the stream, towards Bettie's dad's driveway. The light rectangular things are the forms for the concrete bridge. The gray rock has been dug out from where the footers will go.


Here's a closer look. You can see the rebar sticking up on the road side of the bridge, and where the gray rock was dug up on the other side. Each side of the bridge will be cast into an opened U shape, bases pointing at each other. The water in the creek will flow between the bases of the Us.


Here's another overview, looking up the driveway. The bridge will be perpendicular to the road, and then we'll make a bend to the right before going up the hill. You can see where they have done some clearing and cutting into the hill to make the driveway level.


The house will be on a corner lot. This is the other road, looking up to where it Tees into the main road. The guard rails are where the creek crosses this road onto our property. The builder has put a temporary driveway up to the property from this road because the main driveway is still being built.


Here's our protected flower garden. The Lamb's Ear is doing real well. Other stuff, not so well. Some of the places where we buried bulbs are now sunken and holding water.


Early work on the septic system. I was going to comment about the negative and the positive, the figure and the ground, but it's all ground. I do think that the backhoe dug a scoop of dirt from one side, wheeled around, and deposited it on the other side. That would explain where the dirt came from, and the big tracks down the middle of the two dirt features.


Bettie up at the top of our driveway. It was cold that afternoon! She's facing down the driveway. Our carport and house will be at her back (and about fifty feet farther up). That's our flower garden just off her right hand.


A view from the top of the driveway hill. Yes, this will be interesting in the wintertime.


I'm walking back across the driveway. It had been raining, and it was really gucky and muddy. Behind me are some of the trees that they took down. The top of the driveway is to my right, and the bottom to my left. You can see a bit of the yellow of the backhoe down there.


The top of the temporary driveway. This is towards the back side of our house (dining room, kitchen, and master bedroom). It's late in the day - the shadows are starting to get long.


REAL long!


A deer and my dear. That's a hoofprint on the left, and Bettie's boot print on the right, from our walk up.


Some neat winter berries we saw as we were walking back to the car. They might be from honeysuckle - the tree looked like a weedy shrub. But the berries are neat!


We're standing on the little road, looking down the creek parallel to the main road. The stop sign is just out of the picture to the left. You can see the criminal instrument of Steve's mugging sitting on the ground.


That's all for now!

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

In which Steve and Bettie build a house

This is it - the official house blog for Steve and Bettie's new place.

The ground-breaking (September 17, 2007):















And the first flower bed (but definitely not the last) from November 17:















Now they're doing stuff. With physical machines and everything! Here's the driveway















And here's what they made the path with:















These last two from December 3.

Updates as they are available. But it's getting real!!